Get It While It's Hot brings together scholars, food writers, influencers, and even a CEO to discuss the phenomenon of eating by the side of the road. This innovative collection examines an increasingly commonplace belief across the U.S. South—that some of the best, most enjoyable food comes from places you would not expect: a gas station, the back of a pickup truck, or a ramshackle building made of plywood.
The essays collected here look at the delicious food that can be found in such spaces, but also at the ways that gas station, roadside, and convenience cuisine contributes to the social and cultural identities of people and communities in the U.S. South. Sometimes these roadside spaces serve goals of equity and food justice as they relate particularly to race, class, and gender, and sometimes they stymy them. Contributors address the importance of roadside vendors to low-income areas and communities of color, while also revealing how gas stations and convenience stores are particularly prone to anti-Black surveillance and community gatekeeping. Several essays examine the appearance of service stations and unconventional food vendors in southern literature. Interviews with photojournalist Kate Medley, social media influencer Stafford Shurden, and Stuckey's CEO Stephanie Stuckey provide firsthand perspectives on the diverse landscapes of food culture in the South.
By surveying the importance of roadside and convenience cuisine to communities across the region, Get It While It's Hot illustrates that these spaces do not function like typical restaurants. They mark boundaries of community, establish consistency and familiarity, and invite people, sometimes paradoxically, to pull up a chair and sit a while.
About the Author :
Shelley Ingram, professor of English and folklore at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is coauthor of Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies and coeditor of Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-First Century.
Casey Kayser is associate professor of English and director of the Medical Humanities Program at the University of Arkansas. Her books include Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender and two coedited collections on the work of Carson McCullers.
Constance Bailey, assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, is the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon.
Psyche A. Williams-Forson is professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America, winner of a James Beard Media Award, and Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power.
Review :
"Get It While It's Hot is the rare book that is at once both a monumental intellectual intervention and one of the greatest books on food and community I've read in decades. As a Black southern writer who was fed by the communities explored here, I'm thankful the editors made this offering possible." - Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
"From personal narrative to literary analysis, from livermush to cinnamon rolls, this insightful collection positions gas stations, convenience stores, and cottage industry food sellers as important sites of resistance, community building, cultural assertion, and survival." - Erica Abrams Locklear, author of Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People
"Get It While It's Hot offers a compelling interdisciplinary engagement with the diverse ways southerners and folks passing through find sustenance in unexpected places. In those acts of cultural and somatic nourishment, contributors show how patrons of gas stations and other quick-service food retailers have come to experience those places as hubs of social and economic life. The rich range of material presented here demonstrates the multiple ways that roadside food establishments matter and function in the lives of proprietors, workers, long-time patrons, and weary pit-stoppers. A great companion for your next real or imagined road trip." - Catarina Passidomo, associate professor of environmental studies, Washington and Lee University
